Exploring the themes of memory, intuition, personal space, familial relationships and protection.
Michelle Spencer is a contemporary artist and maker based in Brisbane, Australia. Her practice is intuitive and deeply rooted in meditation, her work shaped primarily through the tactile languages of paint and clay. Her inspiration arises from the liminal spaces of her interior world—where memory, meditation, and myth intersect.
For decades Michelle has explored creativity alongside a contemplative spiritual path. At the meeting point of these journeys, her work becomes a bridge between the invisible and the visible. Her calligraphy is a moving meditation that echos language and a somatic experience of balance and gesture.
Birds ferry human figures between worlds; lines of energy echo ancient parietal markings; eyes hold secret histories; geometry connects and contains multiple realities.
‘Each piece contains a memory or a message. Fashioned with the intention to remind, reveal or hold space for its owner. My work speaks of climbing ladders, sun on your face, casting nets into shallow water and halting birdsong. Mysteries captured within the folds of fine porcelain, air, light, fire, earth and so many stories.’
At the heart of Michelle’s work lies an offering—each piece is a gesture of protection, a balm for intimate spaces, or a reminder of our complex interior lives. Her process begins in stillness, with memory or meditation, before materialising through her chosen medium. Her ceramic practice includes wheel-thrown vessels that are altered and adorned, often featuring animal guardians. These are symbols of secrecy, protection, or transformation. Handbuilt wall sculptures echo motifs found in her paintings: birds, ladders, snakes-visual metaphors that map her spiritual terrain.
This is not work in search of precision—it is a conversation with the unknown and from this exchange, a visual language unfolds—layered with symbols, echoes, and recurring motifs that mark pathways back to what is tangible and true.
‘I think it’s possible to capture energetic frequencies using brush and ink, it’s about stilling the mind and allowing the body to express the signature. I have spent so much of my life thinking about art, so much time running around my monkey-mind trying to achieve what lives in my head. My calligraphy is all about resting and receiving. There is profound peace in that act of surrender that I believe, comes through in this work.’
